The Night before Reading

Leave a comment

Like many people bound to their circumstances by work (and now a mortgage) I see travel to far-off places is a dream.  On my personal bucket-list is Iceland.  Perhaps that’s a strange place to yearn for in winter, but it’s on my mind today because of Jolabokaflod.  I’ve posted on Jolabokaflod before, but in case the concept is unfamiliar I’d summarize it by saying Icelanders, who are exceptionally literate, give each other books on Christmas Eve and spend the dark hours reading.  For the past three years I’ve taken part in a reading challenge that lists a book in translation, and invariably I choose one by an Icelandic author.  Publishers in Iceland, being less corporate than our native species, accept books for publication somewhat more readily—I’ve been shopping a novel around for nearly a decade now and I’ve read worse.  If it doesn’t jack up the dollar signs, so nobody around here’s interested.

I’m sure it’s not all sweetness and light in Iceland.  I suspect, for one thing, it’s hard to be vegan there.  Then there’d be the need to learn Icelandic.  The nights would be even longer in winter, but then, those long nights would be filled with books.  I sometimes imagine how different America would be if we loved books that much.  I remember well—as you may also—the classmates who grumbled about “having to read” as part of their school curriculum.  And this began well before high school.  Young people’s bodies are full of energy and they want action (which can be found in books, I might add) and new experiences (ditto).  Our culture feeds them the myth that such things lead to happiness.  Instead, they find sitting still tedious.  When life leads them to commute, they fill bus time with devices.

The other day I had an electrician in our house—the previous occupants had some strange ideas about power distribution.  He, as most visitors do, commented that we have a lot of books.  I’m beginning to feel less apologetic about it than I used to.  We have books not only because it’s been part of my job to read, but because we like books.  One of the painful memories of 2018 was the loss of many volumes due to a rainstorm that flooded our garage right after our move.  It still makes me sad to go out there, remembering the friends I lost.  Nevertheless, it’s Christmas Eve, at least in my tradition, and the thought of books combined with the long hours of darkness brings a joy that I’d almost characterize as being Icelandic.  At least in my mind.  Jolabokaflod might well be translated, “silent night, holy night.”

Slight Reading

Leave a comment

It will soon be time to turn to holiday-oriented posts, but if you’re like me you’ve been seeing the decorations and hearing the music for some time now already.  Given that, at least in name, Christmas is a religious holiday it fits naturally into this blog.  So does the supernatural in itself.  This year I have read most—there’s one book unavailable—of the book-length work of/about Ed and Lorraine Warren.  The latest, some five years after Ed died, was Conversations with Ed and Lorrain Warren by T. Sealyham.  My copy, which came used from a library, has all the marks of self-publication.  It really needed an editor to go over it.  The transcribed radio interviews with Tony Spera, the Warrens’ son-in-law, the accounts told are familiar to those who know the Warrens’ other work, with a few new ones thrown in.

What is immediately striking here, apart from the factual errors (the Isle of Skye is not in the North Sea and Loch Ness is not between Edinburgh and Jedburgh) is the strong desire for credibility.  Personal anecdotes are offered as proof.  Even on the radio claims are made to having photographs (which can’t be seen in that medium) that aren’t shown because of various restrictions.  There’s no doubt that Ed and Lorraine were completely sincere in that they believed in the reality of the phenomena they studied.  They have to be credited with taking seriously what mainstream science simply cannot study.  I often found myself wondering why there can’t be any middle ground here.  The truth only appears when all the hands are face-up on the table.

Volumes like this, that preserve misstatements of a clearly aging Ed, do not help the cause of credibility.  Yes, people get forgetful with age.  Yes, people sometimes misspeak.  Credulity, however, doesn’t lead to credibility.  Many times Tony, after receiving an intriguing answer to a question, would immediately switch the subject instead of following up with a probing request for more detail.  The interview becomes a pastiche of friends remembering old times and claiming this is the truth because they all agree that it is.  Perhaps my negative response comes from the fact that truth itself is under attack by the United States government even as I write.  The world has lost the ability to judge objective evidence and come out with a reasoned assessment.  Are there ghosts?  Perhaps so, but to get to the truth of the matter will require more than the insistence that we believe “because I told you so.”

Reading Lights

Leave a comment

Late one night in Wisconsin—I had just come off the train from Champaign-Urbana—one of the students from Nashotah House was driving me to my spooky apartment on campus as part of his work-study job.  He mentioned what seemed an obscure topic to me, and I asked him why he liked it.  “Who can say,” he responded, “why they like anything?”  He had a point.  Work on Nightmares requires reading current studies of horror, and one that came out just before Halloween was Darryl Jones’ Sleeping with the Lights on: The Unsettling Story of Horror.  I don’t know why I like such things, but when the book was first announced I knew I’d need to read it, and soon.  It had to wait until the Warren books were finished, however.

This little gift book (with a novelty cover, even) contains quite a bit of insight.  In fact, while reading it I discerned that Jones had spotted something that I’d begun to write down independently.  Horror does that to people.  The book is divided up into chapters addressing different genres of monsters and analyzing why they have proven so popular with both horror authors and auteurs.  The discussion is lively and even witty at times, as befits a topic that most people really misunderstand.  I myself used to misunderstand it—I went through a terrible period of repudiating the things I liked when growing up (who could say why?).  I jettisoned my interest in the Gothic even as I visited ruined castles in the Scottish highlands, and thought that horror was something best left to the uneducated.

One of the realities of my own life—perhaps some of my readers will find it true as well—is that once you’ve been put through the mill once or twice your mind starts going back to childhood in what may be a vain effort to start all over again.  The likes of your youth come flooding back—this is why I began reacquiring Dark Shadows novels.  They aren’t fine literature, but they were one of the guilty pleasures with which I grew up.  As Jones notes, vampires are one of the most enduring of monsters.  He suggests that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was among the notably influential books of Victorian English literature.  As Jones points out, there are people who back away from him when he tells them he studies horror.  He also makes a clear case for its enduring connection with religion.  I might add as a coda here, that telling people you study religion often gets the same response as telling them you study horror.

Solstice Musings

Leave a comment

Should my posts of late be castigated as against the Christmas spirit I would rely on Andy Williams’ song, “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” in my defense.  “There’ll be scary ghost stories,” the crooner sings amid images of cheer and celebration.  What may not be appreciated by my less sober celebrants is that the long nights of winter have as close an association with ghosts as they do with the numerous religious holidays that fervently pray for the return of the light at this time of year.  In merry old England, which along with Germany developed the modern concept of Christmas, the holiday was observed with evening ghost stories as is well represented by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (likely the source behind Williams’ lyric reference).

So I read about ghosts when the light begins to fail.  Or at least that’s my excuse.  When Ghost Hunters took to the air in 2004 the world became aware that electronic devices can pick up anomalies and other ghost-hunting groups began to appear.  Alan Brown, apparently curious about this development, wrote Ghost Hunters of New England as a field guide of sorts to paranormal investigators.  The book divides the region by states and includes the answers to survey questions asked to each of them.  The result isn’t especially inspirational, however, as these groups share in common the obvious absence of scientists.  It may be that professional scientists fear the career impact of such associations, but as is the case in many academic disciplines, their lack of participation simply erodes the credibility of science in the eyes of many.

Human investigation of the world has reached a point where many academic specialists can no longer communicate effectively with the average person.  I work in academic publishing and it is clear that many specialists simply do not recollect the level at which those without advanced training read.  We therefore see the rise of hoi polloi as self-appointed experts.  If scientists won’t investigate ghosts, plumbers will.  And since, no matter what science declares, many people experience ghosts, they will listen to those who at least seek answers.  The problem with books like Brown’s, of course, is that if a fad fades the groups disappear leaving the information outdated.  A couple of the groups were interesting enough to send me to the websites listed only to find the domain name for sale and the ghost hunting shingle removed from the door.  Still, the book had some useful information for those willing to consider the possibilities.  After all, the nights can be awfully long in December.  And there’ll be scary ghost stories…

Deliverance

Leave a comment

Ed Warren died in 2006, effectively ending the cooperative ghost-hunting venture with his widow Lorraine.  The Warrens rose to prominence after being among the first to investigate what is now known as the “Amityville horror.”  Not being writers, the Warrens hired those more talented in the literary arts to recount some of their more famous adventures.  Their books were a hot commodity in the 1980s, selling well through commercial publishing houses.  These accounts then went the way of out-of-print books, settling into used bookstores and attic corners.  With the release of the horror movie The Conjuring, these titles came back into demand and enterprising publishers licensed the content in order to resurrect the books.  The latest effort was Deliver Us from Evil, written by J. F. Sawyer and published after Ed’s death.

Now, if you’ve been following the thread of my posts on these books you’ll know they were never belles lettres to begin with.  Many of them are disturbing to read, regardless of whether you believe in the supernatural or not.  Deliver Us from Evil, which is subtitled True Cases of Haunted Houses and Demonic Attacks, reads like a collection of juvenile ghost stories.  Unlike many of the other books in this informal series, it doesn’t go into detail of how the Warrens investigated the cases.  Although it doesn’t state this directly, it seems that since Ed couldn’t narrate the procedures and outcomes, the stories are simply left to stand on their own.  There isn’t much glue between them and the accounts themselves, which occasionally eerie, lack the conviction that a self-convinced Ed apparently gave to the other exemplars.

Since my follow-up to Holy Horror (which just arrived on my doorstep) deals with movies about demons, I have been eager to read the entire Warren oeuvre.  There are two remaining books, as far as I’m able to determine, and one has become a collectors’ item and is priced that way.  This is, it seems to me, an odd but working-class way to do research.  Books, even if not by academic publishers, are part of the public record, and as such, deserve consideration of some kind.  Yes, many books can simply be dismissed.  Nobody has time to read them all.  Nevertheless, it’s true that to be informed a researcher should put aside prejudice and see what the public record states.  Deliver Us from Evil was a quick read from that record with no real plot and a kind of haunting ending.  I wonder what Ed would’ve thought.

Better Late Than

1 Comment

It seems that Holy Horror is now available, although I haven’t seen it yet.  According to the McFarland website it’s in stock just in time for the holidays.  Those of you who know me (few, admittedly) know that I dabble in other social media.  One of my connections on Goodreads (friend requests are welcome) recently noted that he does not like or watch horror.  Indeed, many people fall into that category.  His follow-up comments, however, led me to a reverie.  He mentioned that reading the lives of the saints and martyrs was horrific enough.  One of the claims I make in Holy Horror is that Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ is a horror film.  My friend’s comment about martyrs got me to thinking more about this and my own revisionist history.

Traditionally horror is traced to the gothic novel of the Romantic Period.  Late in the eighteenth century authors began to experiment with tales of weirdly horrific events often set in lonely castles and monasteries.  From there grew the more conventional horror of vampire and revenant tales up into the modern slasher and splatter genres.  I contest, however, that horror goes back much further and that it has its origins in religious writing.  Modern historians doubt that the mass martyrdoms of early Christianity were as widespread as reported.  Yes, horrible things did happen, but it wasn’t as prevalent as many of us were taught.  The stories, nevertheless, were written.  Often with gruesome details.  The purpose of these stories was roughly the same as the modern horror film—to advocate for what might be called conservative social values.  The connection is there, if you can sit through the screening.

Holy Horror focuses on movies from 1960 onward.  It isn’t comprehensive, but rather it is exploratory.  I’ve read a great number of histories of the horror genre—a new one is on my reading stack even as I type—and few have traced this phenomenon back to its religious roots.  Funnily, like horror religion will quickly get you tagged as a weirdo.  Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both goths and priests wear black.  As I’ve noted before on this blog, Stephen King’s horror novels often involve religious elements.  This isn’t something King made up; the connection has been there from the beginning.  We may have moved into lives largely insulated from the horrors of the world.  Protestants may have taken the corpus from the crucifix for theological reasons, but for those who’ve taken a moment to ponder the implications, what I’m saying should make sense.  Holy and horror go severed hand in bloody glove.

Straining Credulity

Leave a comment

Ed and Lorraine Warren aren’t easy to figure out.  I realize that for someone who holds an actual doctorate from a bona fide, internationally recognized research university this might be something strange to say.  That’s because the standard academic response is simple dismissal.  Ed, at least, was known to have stretched the truth from time to time, but that’s not the same as never having reported weird things that actually happened.  This is why I’ve long advocated academics at least looking at the evidence—rare though it may be—before the simple hand-waving dismissal.  Part of the problem is that the Warrens’ books were written by credulous followers who don’t question things nearly enough.  Ghost Tracks, by Cheryl A. Wicks, may be the last of this strange genre of hortatory, biographical accounts “by” the Warrens written while Ed was still alive.

Skepticism is very important.  But so is listening to people.  What I find compelling is that similar weirdness—frequently dismissed out of hand—has been recorded throughout the length and breadth of history and across the entire globe.  The problem is that many of these things fall outside current scientific means of testing.  While perhaps not widely known, very reputable universities quietly explore these possibilities with actual science.  Part of the problem of the Warrens, as well as various other “ghost hunters” is that they use scientific equipment and think that makes them scientists.  It doesn’t.  Science requires deep engagement and many years of strenuous study.  And yes, skepticism has to be part of it.  The thing the Warrens have to offer is that they realize(d) that when science does engage the supernatural interesting things emerge.

Sensationalism, however, is the slave of capitalism.  Books sell better when they make extraordinary claims and declare they’re based on true events.  Trying to make a living investigating the paranormal led the Warrens, it seems, to tip the balance a little too far in the way of credulity.  Some of the stories in Ghost Tracks are more believable than others.  Some are just plain frustrating.  Ed’s interview with George Lutz (of Amityville fame), for example, is full of dropped balls.  A good question receives an intriguing answer only to have the subject immediately switched by the interviewer.  Even just a little skepticism and a follow-up question would have done scads to improve the believability of the story.  This is something a scientist would have known.  Someone as smart as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, although his Sherlock Holmes generally found  ratiocination led to physical explanations, believed in the supernatural.  If only his Holmes might’ve been brought to this discussion we might possibly have learned something.

Book Birds

Leave a comment

I just read an interesting article about how social media, and the internet in general, hijacks our time.  If you’re reading this, no doubt you’ll agree.  Those of us who write books on our “free time” know that the way books are both found and sold is on the web.  Publishers  encourage authors to build a social media platform, usually involving Twitter.  Academics are often hopeless at social media—they’re lousy at following back on Twitter, as I know from experience.  There is a kind of self-importance that comes with higher education which makes many of the professorate assume the work of others is less important than their own.  It’s more blessed to be tweeted than to tweet others.  After all, such-and-such university has hired you, and that proves the value of what you have to say.

Head-banging tweeter

Book publishers, however, will be looking at how many followers you have.  Not that all of them will buy your book, but at least a number of them will know about it.  Curiosity, indeed, drives some sales.  Just like many academics, I’m jealous of my time.  I’m also conscious of that of others.  These blog posts seldom reach over 500 words.  I tweet only a couple times a day, although I understand that’s not the way to get more followers.  You need to tweet like a bird, often with images or memes, but try explaining that to your boss when each tweet is time-stamped.  The academic is uniquely privileged to be given control of their time outside of class and committee meeting.  Tweet away.  That doesn’t mean they’ll follow you back.

The reason for tweeting is, of course, self-promotion.  45 may understand little, but he understands that.  You can commit treason and people will overlook it if you tweet persistently enough.  My own Twitter activity is like the eponymous birds after which the site is named; it is active before most people are awake.  And it, like this blog, is not designed to take up your time.  Since my tweeting during the work day is limited, my tweets are seldom picked up.  I try following other academics, but often they don’t follow back.  After all, what does a mere editor have to say that could possibly be of interest to the high minded?  Alas, I fear my advanced studies of the Bible have become bird-feed.  And my forthcoming book won’t get noticed.  I only wish more colleagues would consider the adage, tweet others as you would like to be tweeted.

I’ll Be Googled

Leave a comment

It’s a strange sensation to do an innocent web search only to find yourself cited.  (And no, I was not googling myself.  At least not this time.)  I was searching an obscure publisher and my own pre-publication book, Holy Horror, came up on Google books.  Now, the computer engineers I know tell me that Google remembers your searches, and this has a way of being unintentionally flattering; when I search for my book it pops up on the first page because I have searched for it before.  Still, it was a bit of a surprise to find myself where I had no idea I’d been cited.  All of this drew my mind back to my “post-graduate” days at Edinburgh University.  To how much the world has changed.

One of the first things you learn as a grad student is you can’t believe everything you read.  Granted, most of us learned that as children, but nevertheless, with academic publishing a new bar is raised.  That which is published by a university press is authoritative.  So we’re led to believe.  But even university presses can be fooled.  This prompts the fundamental question of who you can really believe.  Our current political climate has elevated that uncertainty to crisis levels, of course, and the vast majority of people aren’t equipped to deconstruct arguments shouted loudly.  Where you read something matters.   Even publishers, however, are fallible.  So what am I to make of being cited by the web?  And is my book already available before I have seen a copy?

Even credibility can be bought and sold.  Colleagues make a much better living than me with the same level of training, but with more influential connections.  It was just this reason that I decided to try to shift my writing to these who don’t need credentials to impress each other.  Some of the smartest people I ever knew were the janitors with whom I started my working life.  As a fellow post-grad in Edinburgh once said, professors are always ready to fail you for your lack of knowledge but most can’t tell you what an immersion heater is.  (That’s one of those Britishisms that no amount of graduate courses at Harvard will teach you.)  I suppose when it’s all said and done nobody else will ever search for the obscure publisher that brought my book to Google’s attention.  No matter, at least Google will always flatter me.

Long Nights

Leave a comment

Before I really knew who Ed and Lorraine Warren were, I watched a made-for-television movie called, I think, A Haunting in Connecticut.  Unlike many television movies, it was actually quite scary.  Fast forward several years and I find myself writing a book that involves the Warrens.  I felt obligated to read all the books they “wrote”—all of them ghostwritten—and I’d been holding off on the one titled In a Dark Place, which is the story behind this television movie which was subsequently made into a theatrical movie.  The book is by Ray Garton and the parents of the family involved (Carmen Reed and Al Snedeker) are also credited.  The story is indeed a dreary one, not something I expected would bring any holiday cheer.  About that I was correct.

Why do I do it, then?  A concern with veracity drives me.  Throughout history enough people have told stories like this that either we have to lump our species together as a bunch of lying attention-grubbers, or there might be something to what they say.  The academic and official responses have long been to state that such things can’t happen, so they don’t.  When compared with how we come to know other things about life, we quickly realize that it involves experience.  In cases where experience is anomalous we tend to dismiss it.  We are great conformers.  What if there really was a demon in the Snedeker house?  Others have told similar tales.  If there’s any reality to it, shouldn’t we know?

As a former academic, I always thought that if we really wish to learn the truth, no subject should be off-limits.  That’s not the same thing as credulousness.  We don’t have to believe everything overwrought people say, but the subject should be worth consideration.  Of course, those who ghostwrote for the Warrens claim that they were given liberty to stretch the truth to make a better story.  They also tend to claim that the basic elements of the story are true.  When someone’s writing a book, there’s likely some hope of remuneration involved.  And sometimes the truth isn’t quite flashy enough for major presses with the bottom line in sight.  Still, the question of what really happened is left open.  The internet is a place where credulity reigns.  We can seek truth there only with great caution.  Maybe that is the lesson to apply to books like this as well.  Although In a Dark Place is scary, there was money at stake, and as the wise say, money changes everything.

Editing the Week

Leave a comment

Every great once in a while I have to pull my head from the clouds and remind myself I’m an editor.  Actually, that happens just about every Monday morning.  Surprisingly, academics who have trouble getting published don’t bother to consult editors for advice.  Having sat on both sides of that particular desk, I certainly don’t mind sharing what I’ve learned since publishing isn’t as straightforward as it seems.  It has its own mythology and authors—I speak from experience here—feel extremely protective of their books.  Nevertheless, editors are under-utilized resources when it comes to figuring out how to approach a topic.  They often possess valuable advice.

It’s easy to think publishing exists to preserve and disseminate ideas and insights, tout court.  The idea that if you get past your dissertation committee you’ve done service that requires wide readership is natural enough.  Publishers, however, have other angles to consider.  Books incur costs, and not just paper, glue, and ink.  There are many people involved in bringing a book from idea to object, and each of them has to be paid to do their part.  (Many academics in the humanities may not understand the concept of “overhead,” but it’s an everyday reality in the publishing world.)  Not only that, but even the book itself is a matter of negotiation.  My latest book (and I suspect well over 90 percent of the authors with whom I work have no idea that I write books as well) had a chapter expunged and a new one written at the behest of my McFarland editor.

One of the pervasive myths in this business is that authors write whatever book they want and then find a publisher.  Sometimes that works.  Often when it does the authors are disappointed in the results.  There are presses that specialize in cranking out such works, slapping an enormous price tag on them, selling them to libraries, and then letting them go out of print.  I’ve been there.  I know.  Academics want prestige presses to take their books to a higher profile, but without having to change things according to the advice of an editor.  There are hidden lives of editors.  I can’t share much of that here, but I can expound its corollary—taking advantage of free editorial advice makes good sense.  I wouldn’t be bothering you with such mundane thoughts on this blog, but when I rolled out of bed today I learned it was Monday morning.

Taking It Seriously

Leave a comment

It would be incorrect to say that I choose to watch and read horror.  What would be more correct would be “Horror compels me to read and watch it.”  Those of us mesmerized by the genre tend to be a reflective lot.  We ask ourselves the question others frequently ask us—why watch it?  And yet, horror films tend to do very well at the box office.  Some even become cultural icons.  Of the many books analyzing horror, it would be difficult to suggest one more influential than Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror: or Paradoxes of the Heart.  It has been in just about every bibliography I have read in the subject.  It’s easy to see why.  There are lots of gems in this book, and it does indeed address the paradox at the heart of it all.

Philosophy, due to the very fact that there are competing schools, doesn’t attempt to provide the answer.  It offers an answer, one that hopefully makes sense of the overall question.  What question?  The one with which I began: why do people get into horror?  Carroll comes down to a deceptively simple answer, but I would make bold to suggest it does so at the cost of having undercut the religious element.  As in nearly every book on horror, Carroll does address the connection with religion.  He finds it lacking, but the reason seems to be his definition of religion.  He follows, perhaps a little too closely, Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy.  No doubt, it’s a classic.  Still, it doesn’t encompass the broad scope of religion and its genetic connection to horror.

At many points of The Philosophy of Horror I felt compelled to stand up and cheer.  I didn’t, of course, since much of the reading was done on the bus.  My ebullience was based on the fact that here was an intellectual who gets it, one who understands that horror is pervasive because it is meaningful.  Sure, it’s not to everyone’s taste.  It’s not, however, simply debased imagination, or arrested development gone to seed.  There is something deeply compelling about horror because it helps us to survive in a world that is, all paranoia aside, out to get us.  Yes, it engages our curiosity, as Carroll asserts.  It satisfies more than it disgusts.  It also defies explanation.  Perhaps that’s the deep connection with religion.  It can never be fully explained.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.  And this book is a valiant effort indeed.

Russian into Things

Leave a comment

It’s the holiday season.  The people I overheard at the bus stop the other day were discussing shopping on the bus.  It can be a long trip from here, and evening traffic out of New York (ironically) is quite heavy this time of year.  Bored commuters, sitting on the bus with their phones, shop.  I couldn’t help but notice that I was the only one with the overhead light on during the fully dark ride home this week.  At one point the driver seemed to think it was a mistake on my part and snapped it off.  I carry a book light with me for just such eventualities, but I had that odd feeling one gets when everyone else got the memo but you didn’t.  In any case, I was reading a physical book, not shopping.

Then I read about a book I need for my research.  Problem is, I don’t have an institution, or a wealthy sponsor, so I often buy books used.  Back in my teaching days Amazon was new, and the idea of buying books online foreign and unfamiliar.  Now you can’t find a bookstore when you want one.  In any case, this particular book was on offer on eBay.  Now, I haven’t used eBay for quite a while.  I never think of it as a place to find reading material, but there it was.  Who would’ve thought research would ever lead in this direction?  The price was reasonable, so I signed in as a guest and placed my order.  With out of print books like this you run the risk of price-gouging or sudden unavailability—the independent researcher’s nightmare.

When the confirmation page came up, I couldn’t help but notice that the header was in Russian.  I wondered if Trump’s dream had really finally come true, or if the eBay on which I ordered an out-of-print book was really a trap.  How do you find out?  Who do you tell when your current government is completely at the beck and call of the Russian government?  I was in a brown study for a while.  The book, used, on Amazon was listed at over a thousand dollars, and this for a paperback published in 2009.  People will pay quite a lot for certain books, even if they don’t retain their resale value.  Ideas, it seems, are worth more than money.  But we no longer have a government to protect our interests.  Not even research, it seems, is safe any more.

If you squint, he could be St. Nick

Carrie On

1 Comment

Stephen King was still a fairly new writer when I first read “Lawnmower Man” for an English class in high school.  Carrie had been published by then, but I didn’t read any more Stephen King until after my academic job ended.  (There is, for those who are curious, a correlation between that traumatic change and my interest in horror.)  Like many, I suspect, I saw some of the movies before reading the King books behind them.  With a writer as prolific as King there’s always the issue of where to start, and I’m often subject to the selections independent bookstore owners make.  I seldom buy fiction through Amazon—I have to see the book for it to grab me (a kind of King thing to happen).

A used copy of Carrie recently came my way.  Now, I’ve seen the movie (both versions) many times; it is discussed at some length in Holy Horror.  I’d not read the novel until now.  Obviously there are differences between book and movie, but as this was Stephen King’s debut novel it struck me just how central religion was to the fearful scenario he paints.  That’s pretty clear in the film, I know, but it’s even more so in the novel.  Carrie is made into a monster by religion.  One could argue that she was born that way—telekinesis as a genetic marker is also a theme in the book, although absent from the films.  Still, it is Carrie’s rejection by others, largely because of her religion, that leads her to use her powers to destroy Chamberlain, Maine.

In a strange way, Carrie is a coming-of-age story from a girl’s perspective.  Strange because King is a man and some literary magazines won’t even accept stories written from the point-of-view of someone of the opposite gender.  Men can’t know what women go through.  Indeed, most of the male characters in the story are less than admirable, while some are downright wicked.  The real question is whether religion saves from wickedness or causes it.  There’s not much ambiguity here on the part of Mr. King.  Holy Horror, although it deals with movies and not novels,  makes the point that films based King don’t infrequently use religion as a source of horror.  Long-time readers of this blog know that I frequently make the point that this genre, more so than most, relies on religion as an engine to drive it.  And religion also has a role in repressing women.  Coincidence?  Ask Carrie.

Personal Gothic

Leave a comment

As I continue work on Nightmares with the Bible, I am reminded just how influential Edgar Allan Poe has been in my life.  It’s not that I read Poe every day, but it’s more that his stories have stayed with me since childhood.  For an English term paper in high school, the last one I recall writing, I selected Poe as the subject.  Something of the sadness of his life made me feel as though we were kindred spirits, although I could never meet him, and never let him know that he would have had a friend if he had been born a maybe a century and a half later, and if possible, in Franklin, Pennsylvania.  If his fondness for drink came with him, he would likely have met my father in such circumstances.

Even today I feel a kind of fiercely protective interest in Poe, as if his poems and stories had been written exclusively for me.  Seeing a handwritten fine copy of “The Raven” on display in the Morgan Library and Museum brought tears to my eyes.  Like Poe, I strive to make a living as a writer, but unlike Poe, I cop out.  I’m too afraid of losing everything.  Jobs necessarily interfere with writing, and some jobs actively discourage it.  Nevertheless, I still feel the shudder when I think about the first time I read many of his stories.  This was, I suspect, what fed my young interest in horror.  It wasn’t the blood and gore of the slasher film, it was the quiet, sad, disturbing atmosphere of Poe.  It has been recaptured by few, in my experience maybe only by Shirley Jackson.

Those who write are connection seekers.  Writing is a way of testing to see if we alone see the world in our own way.  Will others respond?  Poe somehow, mainly after his own lifetime, touched a responsive chord with many.  His work is now very widely known.  His visage appears on everything from bandages to socks.  His stories and poems are endlessly retold, adapted, and parodied.  When I read Poe I hear someone speaking from a life of hard knocks.  His response was to strike back, through his writing.  The life story written by one of his relatives suggests that he wasn’t as gloomy and tortured as he is generally portrayed.  Perhaps not.  Nevertheless, those of us who find gothic literature somehow redemptive know, once we close the cover, who it is we should thank.